Scentee plug-in accessory lets you smell incoming notifications

Ringtones, phone vibrations, and LED lights as a way to alert you to new notifications on your smartphone? That’s so 2012. What we really want is the ability to smell important notifications. Okay, maybe we don’t want that, but that’s not stopping the Scentee from realizing this scent-filled dream. No, we aren’t kidding.

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The Scentee is a brand new Japanese-made accessory that plugs directly into your headphone socket, sort of like Pressy but with an entirely different objective. This unique plug-in device lets out the aroma of your choice whenever you get certain kinds of notifications including text messages, alarms and social network alerts.

To produce the smell, Scentee uses special ‘flavor’ capsules that come in a very wide range of scents including strawberry, corn soup, coconut, apple, jasmine and bacon. The Scentee also features a customizable LED light that creates a unique lightening effect each time the device releases a smell.

Outside of being used for notifications, the Scentee also features a timer system that will release a scent every half hour or however often you wish. Keep in mind that capsules are only good for about 100 uses and run about $5.

How exactly does the Scentee work? Basically it uses a custom (iOS and Android) app that allows you to determine what notifications will trigger the internal perfume. Once you receive a notification, the app will then use ultrasonic wave that will cause a chip inside to react and spray out the smell of your choosing.

To get an even better idea of how the Scentee functions, check out Engadet’s hands-on video showing off this odd-ball accessory:

As you can tell, the Scentee isn’t exactly practical or even at all ‘useful’ beyond novelty, but that doesn’t make it any less cool.

If you’re interested in picking up the Scentee, the device will arrive to Amazon Japan on November 15th for about $35, and will hopefully make its way to the rest of the world ‘eventually’. What do you think of the Scentee, if it your local market, would you be interested in picking it up?